A Darkness More Than Night (Harry Bosch)

Product Information

It's that bizarre owl that's the centerpiece of McCaleb's investigative efforts. Author Connelly leads McCaleb (and this fascinated reader) on a magnificent journey through "A Garden of Earthly Delights", as it were - a fabulously informative sidebar on the paintings of sixteenth century Dutch Renaissance painter, Hieronymus Bosch. It isn't long before McCaleb and Winston have Harry Bosch in their sights as their sole suspect in Gunn's murder. They've got it figured as Bosch meting out frontier justice because he couldn't corral Gunn within the framework of the legitimate legal system. Bosch admits to having trouble quitting smoking, which he was initially fairly successful at in Angels Flight until his Cigarette of Anxiety. LAPD detective Harry Bosch, star of Angels Flight, crosses paths with Bloodwork's Terry McCaleb in Michael Connelly's most tension-charged novel ever. As it happens Hieronymus Bosch happens to be Harry's given name, and Terry puts two and two together to make five. He tells Deputy Winston he thinks Bosch killed the trussed up victim. Oh no.....say it ain't so!! 😕

McCaleb tries to convince us that Bosch might have, just like anyone, descended into darkness after watching so much dark human activity (you know, that Nietzschean injunction that has become a cliched: “He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster”).The reader understands immediately, even if Winston doesn't, that once this case gets its hooks into McCaleb, it's not going to let go. Civilian or not, and whether anyone wants him to or not, McCaleb will wind up in the middle of it. And the deeper McCaleb digs into the case, the more the evidence leads him in the direction of a startling suspect. For a large part of the story, McCaleb and Bosch are operating independently until their worlds connect. Terry believes Harry is behind the murder of Edward Gunn because aspects of the crime scene seem to provide a connection. What makes this story compelling are the contrasts of the investigative styles of these two men. Both have really good instincts but their approaches couldn't be more different. City of Bones: When the bones of a young boy are found scattered in the Hollywood Hills, Harry Bosch is drawn into a case that recalls the darkest memories from his own haunted past. Then a love affair begins to blossom for Bosch — until a disastrous mission leaves him in more trouble than ever before, as he faces an unimaginable decision... Connelly's many fans are in for a treat because his latest novel features his unorthodox streetwise cop Harry Bosch and brilliant psychological profiler Terry McCaleb ... Sharply original and unfailingly gripping ( MAIL ON SUNDAY)

Connelly reminds us, "Words from a killer were always significant and put a case on a higher plane. It most often meant that the killing was a statement, a message transmitted from killer to victim and then from the investigators to the world as well."

Book Summary

The second storyline is about a courtcase against a bigshot Hollywood producer who had the guts to admit to Bosch he had killed somebody but would get away with it. The courtcase's star-witness is Harry Bosch. Terry is called in to investigate a possible connection between Harry Bosch and the murder of Edward Gunn. Terry is called in by an old friend, Jaye Winston. She wants Terry's help in figuring out who could have murdered Gunn in a scene that calls upon a famous painting by an artist many readers will know from reading this series. At this point, I would have said this was some straight up obvious set-up, but we have to muddle through things with Terry as he realizes that maybe Bosch has turned a corner into being a murderer. Compare that to the later books in the series where we find a Harry Bosch notably mellower in his older age, where we find endings easily guessed at, where procedure begins to trump a superb plot. Bosch no longer smokes, doesn't drink and drive, doesn't slap people around anymore, where his defiance of LAPD authority is tempered by retirement, and let's face it, where my heart just doesn't race as often anymore. Let's say that his later novels are beginning to show an author's haste (is it me, or are the novels shorter and shorter?) City of Bones" turns its focus on Harry and features a great play on the origin of Harry's name (a famous painter) that figures in the solution of the mystery as well. Connelly's writing continues to impress me with his direct style and excellent flow.

Connelly has an excellent way of glazing over something in a book, usually at the beginning, that has happened between the previous book and the current one; a partner leaving, an incident that led Bosch into a pot of hot water, or a death. Connelly will not dwell on it, but the reader (at least any like me) will take tha splinter and not forget about it. It nags at you and leads you to wonder what happened and how it unfolded. We saw that with the Dollmaker case, Bosch's mother's murder, and now, with the previously hinted at issue of Bosch tossing his commander through a window and being suspended (which came up in THE LAST COYOTE). Here, we get a little more about what happened and why. We also get to learn a great deal more about the painter for whom Harry Bosch was named, and how that connection puts Bosch on the suspect list for some recent killings. Although both are Connelly's creations, Harry Bosch and Terry McCaleb are kept distinct and different by the author. We clearly see the effect that other people make in each man's perspective on life. McCaleb tells Bosch that, to the bureau's civil rights division, nailing down an LAPD cop is more valuable than Park Place and Boardwalk together. Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival. God's work was never done. When a killer was out there using His name as part of the imprint of his crime there often meant there would be more crime. It was said in the bureau profiling offices that God's killers never stopped of their own volition. They had to be stopped."

Unfortunately, Terry McBlah has a starring role, and this book is more of his story than a Bosch story. Which is... fine. It's fine. If I ever do a re-read of this series, I'll just skip this dud.

Murder by Inaction: The ending reveals that Harry knew that the bad guys were going to kill Gunn and did nothing to stop it. For all his Cowboy Cop antics and his hardboiled persona Harry's sense of right and wrong usually stops him from doing stuff like this. McCaleb calls him out in the last chapter and the novel ends with Harry agonizing about whether he crossed the Moral Event Horizon. After graduating in 1980, Connelly worked at newspapers in Daytona Beach and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, primarily specializing in the crime beat. In Fort Lauderdale he wrote about police and crime during the height of the murder and violence wave that rolled over South Florida during the so-called cocaine wars. In 1986, he and two other reporters spent several months interviewing survivors of a major airline crash. They wrote a magazine story on the crash and the survivors which was later short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. The magazine story also moved Connelly into the upper levels of journalism, landing him a job as a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times, one of the largest papers in the country, and bringing him to the city of which his literary hero, Chandler, had written. As Terry’s investigation into Bosch builds into an elaborate situation using historical art and ritualistic murder, uncovered clues seem to mysteriously overlap in strange ways with Bosch’s own movie director court case. As another surprising revelation unfolds, the two cases begin to pull McCaleb and Bosch into each other’s crosshairs in a dangerous game of cat and mouse and life and death. A highly interesting mix, where Bosch relinquishes the driver's seat in one of the novels co-attributed to his series. While he may not be front and centre, Bosch's person and history are certainly up for ananlysis and display.

Wikipedia citation

While I haven't read the first book in Connelly's Terry McCaleb series, I've seen the Clint Eastwood movie; I'm not sure if this prior knowledge of McCaleb's character and his past did in any way heighten my enjoyment of A Darkness More Than Night, but I'm kind of glad I did know what I did (a tip, there, maybe?). Police procedurals, in particular, are about heroes. They are the literal descendants of classics like The Iliad, Beowulf and The Song of Roland. What makes police procedurals different is only that many of our 21st century heroes are deep in their middle age and thus worry about medical benefits and workmen's compensation. Bosch, on the other hand, is the classic lone wolf, with all the impedimenta that role means in popular fiction. "He was ready, ready to dance with the devil once more. He realized that his mission in life was all about moments like these. Moments that should be savored and remembered but that always caused a tight fisting of his guts." Like all heroes, Bosch lives for the "times he had glimpsed the normally hidden face of the monster." You get two character focuses in one in this story. It really serves you well to have read Blood Work first to get a good sense of Terry McCaleb. I believe it made a difference in my enjoyment. While this is the 7th book in the Harry Bosch series, it's the 8th in that universe and the second in the Terry McCaleb series.